Glenn Gould and Journalism

In the Globe and Mail this weekend is an article titled "The meaning of Glenn Gould". Though a 'national' newspaper the Globe and Mail is based in Toronto, Glenn Gould's home, so one might expect, on the occasion of what would have been the 80th birthday of one of Canada's greatest musicians, an article of some weight. But journalism is not what it once was and the sheer conventional stupor of this treatment shows that. It would be expected that many of the readers would not be familiar with many details of who Gould was and what he did. So does the article try and provide some of this? No, it really doesn't. We can tell he was a piano player from the photo, but we get only scattered, oblique hints of what kind of player. It says he was a 'partisan' of Bach, without letting us know that Gould was probably the most influential performer of Bach on keyboard in the 20th century. Instead of that kind of solid sense of who he was and what he did, we get frothy speculation like, would he have done podcasts, would he have blogged? Did he indeed predict today's "mash-up" culture? And what does that even mean? By the end of the article we have learned almost no solid information about one of Canada's great artists. The article sums itself up in this way:

The paradox of Gould was that behind the musical brilliance and technological precision was always the fragile human element, the lonely man who spent hours on the phone with a few close friends who describe him as generous and funny. He is not easy to box in. “He offers so many ideas to take off from. He’s this protean figure,” Egoyan says.

In those meticulous recordings, above Gould’s analytical piano music, you can sometimes hear the lyrical sound of a man humming as he plays.

It is rather sad, isn't it, that the dumbing-down of today's mass media means that you have to reduce a great creative artist and national figure like Glenn Gould to a kind of soap-opera stereotype. Let's listen to some of what he did:

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Music Journalism

Reading music journalism and watching television is like living on hot dogs and potato chips--you don't realize how bad they are until you switch to real food. I canceled my cable ten years ago and I'm glad I did. But I do occasionally stumble into music journalism if I'm not paying attention. I was sent to this article, on contemporary music, by a link from this blog.

I think music journalism must have fallen precipitously from where it was fifty to a hundred years ago. Back then people like George Bernard Shaw and Donald Francis Tovey were, respectively, writing criticism and program notes. Tovey's program notes were later collected and published as Essays in Musical Analysis. But now?

Here's how that article starts:

The music of our time is the music of all time. I've just come up with that, but it's a pretty good motto for a new strand of what you'll be seeing on this blog for the next year. Next week, we launch a new series on contemporary classical music. Each week, I'll be giving a brief overview of the life, music, and online presence of the composers who matter the most to today's musical life, who have made the greatest difference to the last century's musical history - and, to be honest, the ones that mean the most to me, and, I hope, to you too!

Once you wean yourself off this kind of writing, you start to see how annoying it is. For example, what could the first sentence possibly mean? It is like the long scene with the Architect in the second of the Matrix films that put a stake in the heart of the franchise: it sounds vaguely cool, but that is only because it is meaningless. This is the kind of pseudo-prose that would be right at home in a blue jeans commercial. Baby! The second sentence is nearly as annoying for two reasons: it tries to justify the first sentence, which is impossible, plus, misuse of the word "strand". One characteristic of journalists is that they have only a foggy acquaintance with the meaning of the words they attempt to use. The rest of the paragraph is just the usual hand-waving. Well, that was so much fun that it makes me want to 'fisk' the second paragraph as well:

Of course, a mere 52 weeks and 52 composers isn't enough time to reflect a cross-section of everything that's happening in contemporary music, but it is enough time to curate a new-music gallery that should open ears and minds to the music of today.

How does one "reflect" a cross-section, anyway? Special goggles? The very vapidity of the prose makes me want to have nothing to do with anything "curated" by this person.

What sent me to the article was the very clever phrase mongered by Alex Ross:

"Contemporary" is broadly defined as "born in the past hundred years," plus Elliott Carter....

Heh! Elliot Carter is, of course, that astonishingly long-lived and productive composer born December 11, 1908 which means he is coming up on his 104th birthday. And still getting commissions, by the way. The only person you could set beside Carter would be Jacques Barzun, born November 30, 1907, which means he is possibly the only person in the world of arts and letters that can call Elliot Carter "sonny".


The problem with music journalism is that it accepts all the current ideologies without question and mixes them with irrelevancies, personal biases and enthusiastic attacks on straw men. You come away from reading music journalism stupider and less informed than when you started. Hey, it's just like television! Do you insist on examples? Very well. Here is the head and sub-head for one of the articles in the series:

The five myths about contemporary classical music

Contemporary classical music is devoid of melody and appeal, all noise and no fun. At least, that's the cliche. But this is music that is very much at the heart of our modern world

A myth? So this tends to imply that contemporary classical music does have melody and appeal. I wonder if we could find a counter-example...

Or:

Or:

Catchy tunes! And so immediately appealing! I'll pass on fisking the article itself because I would just start citing those logical errors in medieval Latin and we don't want that. Ignoratio elenchi! Petitio principii!


 But of course, there are certainly pieces of contemporary music that are melodic and appealing:

It's music journalism that needs to be avoided, not music.

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Music Journalism

Most music journalism is news about artists and events, new releases, hirings, firings and so on. But it also includes reviews of recordings and performances which is when it becomes, potentially, interesting from my point of view. Here is a piece about a new album, a collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica. I find it very odd, but then I find most reviews very odd. It seems to start with the conclusions, then go on to discuss specifics, but without ever linking them to the conclusions. I wonder if this is because of the distorting demands of journalism that seem to turn most stories upside down so you have to read to the end to find the most pertinent details that should have been at the beginning. Here is a bit from near the beginning:

It's not really designed for people who like music. It sounds like what it is: an elderly misanthrope reciting paradoxical aphorisms over a collection of repetitive, adrenalized sludge licks.

I went to listen to the album but couldn't get past the first thirty seconds of the first three cuts; but they do seem to bear out this comment. The article goes on for much longer, but after that beginning, I wonder why? He does make an interesting point towards the end. This collaboration is a free initiative by the artists, bowing to no commercial demands. The writer, Chuck Klosterman, comments:

For much of my life, I lived under the myth that record labels were inherently evil. I was ceaselessly reminded that corporate forces stopped artists from doing what they truly desired; they pushed musicians toward predictable four-minute radio singles and frowned upon innovation, and they avariciously tried to turn art into a soulless commodity that MTV could sell to the lowest common denominator. And that did happen, sometimes. But some artists need that, or they end up making albums like this.

There are some half-truths there. It is true that art needs discipline. Often that discipline is imposed from the outside--by the noble patrons of the Renaissance, for example. More often it is an essential part of the work of the composer to impose self-discipline. But a creative pop artist faced with, say the four-minute (or even two-minute) limits of a radio single, does not turn out the predictable, because that won't get you to number one!

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